Richly textured and full of surprises, the films of the French director Arnaud Desplechin hopscotch across expectations of genre as they aim to explore the dynamics of character, striving for lyrical insight and a visceral intimacy. The filmmaker, most recently, of 2005’s “Kings and Queen,” visits the Museum of the Moving Image this weekend as part of a retrospective that pairs four of his films with a personal selection from the catalog of some of his favorite directors. The series is presented in collaboration with Cahiers du Cinéma, the influential French film journal which has just launched an English language online edition.

As we spoke on the phone, Mr. Desplechin, 46, was in Paris working on a rough cut of his next movie, “Un conte de Noël,” which stars Catherine Deneuve and Mathieu Amalric and can be described as a Christmas comedy about cancer. “This family is in a house, and there is hate, death, nice girls, and good songs. They enjoy to live. They enjoy to die. They are tough characters in a tough town. Maybe they are a little bit like the [Royal] Tenenbaums.”

To accompany his films at MMI, Mr. Desplechin selected movies by Ingmar Bergman, John Cassavetes, Alain Resnais, and François Truffaut. “They tell love stories in a classical shape, even if they made films in a very modern way,” he said of his picks for the series, which begins Saturday.

‘Summer Interlude’ (Ingmar Bergman, 1950) — “Bergman was the best storyteller I ever saw on the screen,” Mr. Desplechin said. “He goes so fast. It’s amazing how fast he goes. Straight to the heart of the matter. He goes straight to the most vivid, brutal moment and then sees what happens.”

The director was moved to select a Bergman film because of negative commentary he read in articles that followed the Swede’s death earlier this year. For Mr. Desplechin, Bergman’s reputation as a gloomy philosophical force was a case of misappreciation. Before he began directing, “Bergman was just a screenwriter,” he said, “adapting American popular films for Swedish television. I came to realize how much he is really, purely, a storyteller. Like John Huston.”

‘Two English Girls’ (François Truffaut, 1971) — In America at least, most talk about Truffaut’s films is sparked by his work in the late 1950s and 1960s, as a leader of the French new wave. By the 1970s, he had become an arthouse favorite whose romantic features felt more conventional.

“Two English Girls,” which Mr. Desplechin called his favorite Truffaut film, falls in between. Both a sequel of sorts and a reversal of the earlier “Jules and Jim,” it stars Truffaut surrogate Jean-Pierre Léaud as a young man who becomes entangled with the two sisters of the title. Mr. Desplechin was swept away by Truffaut’s incidental sexual candor.

“There is a scene about masturbation that I really adore,” he said. “The two girls are 8 years old and they start to sleep together.” As one of them, now 20, reflects in a flashback, she confesses to her fiancé that her sexual habits make her unworthy to be his bride. (The setting is Paris and England before World War I). “The way it’s told is so scandalous, so human, so perverse, so full of love for kids, for the sexuality of kids. Today, to film such a thing would be shocking. But when you see the film for the first time, you don’t even notice that it’s shocking.”

‘Faces’ (John Cassavetes, 1968) — Cassavetes’s intense, hyper-realist drama about the meltdown of a marriage might seem like an obvious choice for Mr. Desplechin, whose best films are packed with talkative actors stripping themselves to an emotional core. But the director has a more thoughtful angle in mind.

“Often when you speak of invention in the cinema, you talk of who invented time, just as Joyce found a way of inventing the use of time in the novel,” he said. While critics think immediately of directors like Andrei Tarkovsky or Wong Kar-wai as masters of temporal elasticity, it’s Cassavettes who people should be referring to,” Mr. Desplechin said. In films like “Faces,” “all of the elements are dancing together and produce a pure feeling of being alive. You feel right in the action all the time, and yet you can’t say exactly what the action is.”

‘Je t’aime, Je t’aime’ (Alain Resnais, 1968) — Chuckling a bit, Mr. Desplechin said that Mr. Resnais’s science-fiction film about a man who uses time travel as a way to wrestle with a lover’s suicide in the shadow of Nazi internment was released at the wrong time.

“During May 1968, there were more interesting things happening in France,” he said. “This film is not well-known.” The machine relies on an individual’s memories to propel him back in time, where he can attempt to fix things that went wrong. But there’s a catch. “If you change too many things, your brain will explode.”

Mr. Desplechin likened “Je t’aime” to Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo,” with its themes of doubling and loss. “‘Vertigo’ is a masterpiece, because the woman died two times,” he said.

Through October 14 (35th Avenue at 36th Street, Astoria, Queens, 718-784-0077).